Mac App Store Icons Messed Up

Today I released minor updates to Gamma Control
and Counterparts Lite. After pushing the
updates on the Mac App Store, I had the unpleasant surprise to see the two
icons had been put on a black iOS-like round rectangle box. It looks ugly,
not only because the icons aren’t designed to be in such a box, but also
because of the lack of smoothing at the edges.

In truth, it looks like Apple is changing the image’s transparency mask to match
what it should be on iOS, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do for the
iOS App Store but shouldn’t apply to icons on the Mac App Store. Browsing the
Mac App Store seems to reveal a few more apps released today and yesterday
with an out of place black box surrounding the icon.

If you are a developer, you might want to postpone your release until this is
fixed to avoid showing your customers to show a hideous icon. I do hope this will
solve itself without having to submit a new version of the app.

Note that this only affects the icon shown on the Mac App Store. Everything
looks fine on iTunes Connect prior submission, and it doesn’t affect the icon
of the app installed on a user’s computer.

(Added as issue #17841429 on Apple’s bug tracker.)

Follow-ups

August 7 — Looks like this is now being fixed. As I was navigating the store a few minutes ago I saw my app icons change. Most apps that had a mangled icon in the store now have the correct icon, I guess the others will be fixed in a few minutes. That’d make a turnaround time of 10 days.